Exercise: sequence of compositions 2

Following my attempt at the market for this exrecise I decided to give it another shot.
This weekend there was a triathlon that took place in Lausanne. I thought it would be the perfect event to practice my shooting skills for a sport event.

I decided to use my 18-200 canon lens as this was probably the most flexible and the zoom would be helpful if I'm not close enough to the subject.

I went first to take pictures of the bicycle race.

My first thought was to try the panning technique to the passing bicycles. I first tried at a slow shutter speed of 1/13 second. The effect is clearly visible but it was quite hard to keep the subject sharp as the racers were going downhill and very fast.

At this point I was shooting in Raw but soon realised that it's not ideal when firing with continuous frames, the camera's memory can't keep up and you need to wait a few precious seconds in order to shoot again. I then decided to shoot in Jpeg Large format. Considering I would probably taking a few hundred pictures this day it would also save me considerable time on post processing.

1/13s

I then tried a faster shutter speed of 1/80 second. The panning effect is less visible but it made it easier to make the subject sharp this time.

Now the goal was to keep on panning but getting the face of the subject more visible in the frame. I tried panning at 1/100 second to make it easier.

This one above was getting close to my goal. Now zooming closer and getting several racers in the frame was going to be my next attempt.

As this was midly successful, I decided to get a closer shot.

This one went quite well but now I was being greedy and wanted a closer shot with several racers in it.

This one was more like but seeing them from the back doesn't quite do the trick.

At this point I decided to leave panning for a while to try it again later. It wasn't easy to tell from the LCD screen on the camera whether the pictures were sharp enough. The sun was bright and it didn't help. I decided to try a safer approach and went for very fast shutter speeds.

I set my camera at 1/1000 second and change the ISO sensitivity from a 100 to 200.

This resulted in clear images but froze the subjects to a point that the image looks static. It lacked creativity and sense of movement, it really looks like a snapshot.

This next one below is a slight improvement with the position of the racer implying movement and subtle movement can be seen on the wheels

Then I tried zooming in closer at 80 mm.

It makes it a bit more appealing

Trying a different angle and point of view 

Now I'm Increasing the speed to 1/1250 second to see if it has any unusual effect

this one is not bad but still feels very static.

Switching back to 1/160 s and getting and zooming in.

This was again mildly successful but apart from the subjects not being sharp enough I like the composition.

Back to my panning attempts I caught this photographer on a motor bike at 1/40 second 

This is not a bad shot and to photograph a photographer always makes my day.

back to panning at 1/80 s

this works well but the background is not blurred enough to my liking.

with a shutter speed at 1/40 the effect is well rendered, the movement is noticeable and looks good to the eye

I like the movement in these 3 next ones

this one really puts the focus on the green racer with the other s being blurred by the movement. I like the speedy effect.

both racers are sharp, this is probably due going at the same speed and on the same focus range.










Now feeling more comfortabe with panning I try again at 1/25 second and zoom in a bit.

I then went down to the lake (lake Geneva a.k.a lac Leman) to watch the swimming and running.

It was very crowded and not easy to move around. It took ages to get anywhere and the crowd was so dense that there was almost no place I could stand to get a clear view.

I catch this athlete training before the the big race.

I took another shot clear of the barrier.

then onto the swimming race. I wsa too far away and the zoom helped but as swimmers were most of times in the water you couldn't see much other than arms moving.

I shot a picture of 2 swimmers close to eachother making like a bird shape with arms and hands.

when coming out of the water.

on to the bicycle

next the final run.

From the bridge where I managed to go sneaking into the VIP section. I managed to get a quick close-up before getting noticed.

Shot from the bridge with athlete Campbell from the back.

same athlete but further away

another position in the crowd, I took the picture when her face was lit by the sun.

I have taken hundreds of pictures but in this exercise I decided to describe the bicycle race more deeply. The swimming and running was hard to catch as the crowd and blocked area prevented me from having freedom to change my compositions and approach. My goal for the day was to cover parts of all the disciplines, which I managed with some struggling.

What I have learnt here is for a sport event you need to be very organised. knowing the whole program, getting there in advance and finding a strategy to get quickly from one point to another is key. 

The technical part of it is also tricky. I figured you need to make sure your camera's battery is fully charged and the bigger the memory card is the better. The weather conditions also play a huge factor. In this case the sun was very bright and would easily create over-exposed and under-exposed areas at the same time. Then setting your camera's white balance and picture style, shooting JPEG seems to be the way to go. Most of all, experience would have helped me not losing time on technical aspects. I could have focused more on composition and light, taking more close-up pictures. I've noticed here I haven't taking a single vertical frame and this clearly shows I was too overwhelmed by the technicalities of covering this event.